February 6th – 7th, 2025 Kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER, Ghent March 7th, 2025 Festspielhaus St. Pölten, St. Pölten April 24th – 25th, 2025 Lieu Unique, Nantes May 9th – 10th, 2025 Sadler’s Wells, London May 14th – 17th, 2025 Dublin Dance Festival, Dublin June 24th – 27th, 2025 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris 120 minutes
Part fiction, part biographical, all elements are overlapping, and it will become difficult to determine what’s myth and what’s reality.
It goes back to a time when families worked in the abattoirs of Belfast. Pigs in the garden of New lodge.
There’s something in the meat of me, bloodline, there is a pink fleshy vulnerability to me, to dancing, there is a violence in me.
This new show will follow the story of Oona’s Great Great Grandfather Specky Clark and his arrival in Belfast.
For this piece which will be unfolding in a series of theatrical images, Oona Doherty will collaborate with many faithful and new partners. The production features music from Irish band Lankum, Gavino Murgia and David Holmes & Raven Violet. Maxime Jerry Fraisse is sound designer, Irish playwright Enda Walsh is dramaturg, Sabine Dargent is set designer, Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust is costume designer and long-time collaborator John Gunning is lighting designer. The piece will be performed by an international cast of 9 dancers.
After the successful productions Timeless by Xie Xin and I’m afraid to forget your smile by Imre & Marne van Opstal, which was nominated for the DER FAUST 2023 theater prize, the Hessisches Staatsballett combines the dance positions of these currently groundbreaking choreographers for the first time in a double evening in Broken Bob. The marble is created in the earth like the ashes after the fire. In a long transformation, under heat and pressure, its fine lines paint themselves into the stone; tell of the past like the black from the ravages of the flames. Traces decorate and they stick. Hidden deep in the layers of being and buried in the overlay of inner impressions, a broken sense of beauty appears.
Powerful and sublime. Rice paper, gunpowder and six bodies are the ingredients of Xie Xin’s new creation Broken Sense of Beauty. In the piece, the Chinese choreographer deals with a personal tragedy. When dance comes into play, it’s about movement. About movements and their structure. Does this exist outside of the movement that produces it? When structure comes into play, it’s about systems. About systems and their meaning. Does this lie outside of the system that generates it? When meaning comes into play, it’s about people. About people and about Bob. In their new creation I am Bob, Imre & Marne van Opstal explore the effects of patterns in dance. In close connection with music and text, the Dutch siblings create a large choreographic network of identity.
November 13th – 19th, 2024 Grand Théâtre de Genève, Geneva January 18th – 19th, 2025 Staatenhaus, Cologne January 24th, 2025 Festspielhaus St. Pölten, St. Pölten March 30th – April 6th, 2025 Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris Duration: 90 minutes
In Arabic, the word Ihsane represents an ideal of goodness, kindness and benevolence. In Islam, it refers to a form of communion with the universe. With Ihsane, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui continues a diptych begun within his Eastman company with Vlaemsch (chez moi), in 2022. While Vlaemsch was dedicated to his mother and his Flemish roots, Ihsane explores his relationship with his father, who left Morocco for Flanders, emigrating but always retaining – despite leaving – an unconditional love for his home country. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was still a teenager when his father died. Thirty years later, he searched for him in vain in a Tangier cemetery too full of graves. He continues to search for him through this creation bringing together dancers from the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève and Eastman.
But in Belgium, Ihsane is also associated with a racist and homophobic crime that took place in Liège in 2012: a young homosexual man of 32, of Moroccan origin, beaten to death outside a nightclub. As someone who himself identifies as an artist, a queer and an Arab, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui identifies with and pays tribute to him through this production which revisits his family story. Ihsane is a journey towards the quest for inner peace, and the attempt to transcend conflict, abandonment and forgetting. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui dances the questions that obsess him: what do we have left when our place slips away and fades? How can multiple identities coexist in the same body?
As ever, the choreographer has assembled a unique artistic team, reflecting the effervescence and artistic vitality of this region of the world to which Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is linked through his ancestors. Tunisian musician and viola d’amore virtuoso, Jasser Haj Youssef, will compose the music and perform it onstage with Moroccan singer Mohammed el Arabi Serghini and Lebanese singer Fadia Tomb El-Hage. Stage design will be from visual artist Amine Amharech, who creates sensory and sensitive spaces into which Moroccan influences are often melded, while costumes are by fashion designer Amine Bendriouich, who elevates traditional forms of Berber clothing beyond norms and gender.
With Ihsane, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui watches the world change in a never-ending cycle of destruction and rebirth. He is wary of cultures when they imprison and separate individuals. He prefers geography in the making, ever-changing landscapes, and the shared space where we coexist. In this space, he reveals the invisible threads that connect us to each other.
In this new creation, Vandekeybus embraces the void – even more so – he seeks it out. He starts anew, goes back to square one, taking the simple emptiness as a starting point to arrive at a new form of awareness. He not only seeks to feel existence, life, in a different way, but also aims to add a new way of valuing the performance. By looking differently, within complete simplicity.
“Enlarging by emptying” sounds contradictory but works in a simple way: an empty room seems bigger than a full one. True essence demands throwing off all ballast. An emptiness filled with elusive dignity. Bodies attracting each other like minerals and magnets. Movement as expression of the deepest inner state… An emptiness that offers countless possibilities to be filled…
September 26th – 28th, 2024 Teatro Argentina, Rome October 2nd – 4th, 2024 Théâtre 71, Malakoff October 11th – 12th, 2024 Théâtre de Liège, Liège October 30th – 31st, 2024 Halles de Schaerbeek, Brussels November 13th – 15th, 2024 Tandem scène nationale, Douai December 2nd – 15th, 2024 ThéâtredelaCité, Toulouse January 10th – 11th, 2025 Le Parvis scène nationale, Tarbes January 24th – February 1st, 2025 MC93, Bobigny February 18th – 22th, 2025, Comédie de Genève, Geneva 2h
An opus even more choreographic than the previous works, Qui som? , under the influence of the Spanish group Mal Pelo, could be considered the heir to Maguy Marin’s May B or Paso Doble by the duo Josef Nadj and Miquel Barceló.
Philippe Noisette
The first part of a triptych in which ceramic is both the material and the gesture of an investigation into our worlds in the making, a journey through our ways of believing and doing together, Qui som? is a wager: that dreaming is an exploratory and transformative power, an imaginary force that overflows each of us to link us to other presences, a way of orienting ourselves in obscure journeys, in secret lands. It’s a struggle. It’s alive. In colour. In clay. In plastic. In scraps and eternity.
“Our inner worlds, our intimate territories, are the breeding ground for the social landscapes to come. So if what’s to come is already here, inside our bodies, if it’s already being made inside us, we’re trying to highlight what keeps the joy, the desire, what resists, sings and dances inside us forever, to give ourselves the courage to see ourselves and not forget the worst.”
